Holden Ballfield

Since Harry Potter is in the news, this is a good excuse to repost one of my favorite Mark McGurl essays. Hogwarts is a technical school. No pondering the meaning of life here!

@SonRaw rare J-Zone mention. I always loved his production and he was funny as hell

Great rap music that isn't on streaming: Ras Kass - Soul On Ice Most of Mach-Hommy's 2017 The 2010-2011 Odd Future catalogue J-Zone's early catalog Action Bronson's Blue Chips 1-2 +Rare Chandeliers

@CHRISF0GLE pre ordered

@CHRISF0GLE the lipsky pull quote is insane

Bruce Lee Wisdom

@iREUS_SA Flash's expression on that cover can only be described as get me out of this hellish existence

New arcs start here! These issues are perfect jumping-on points for the current runs and all of them are great! Superman #36 Green Lantern #33 The Flash #31

@California_Derp @GunnelsWarren Oh no teachers want a good contract how evil

@GunnelsWarren robots won't do this:

I don’t want my daughter’s teacher to be a humanoid robot named Plato. I want her teacher to be a human being that is paid a living wage and is not forced to work 3 jobs to survive.

@amconmag Teaching is so much more than being an information delivery mechanism. Fuck all the way off.

@amconmag The dumbshits in these comments maybe need the robot "educators." Same kind of dipshits that ask Grok to verify information they could spend 1 minute googling if they a third of a brain

"Imagine a humanoid named Plato." Melania Trump says humanoid educators will offer "instantaneous" access to the classical studies for students and help create a "more complete person."

@CHRISF0GLE There's no way AI could do what i do. These people view teaching literally as "giving information" as if it isn't way more than that.

@Truth_Junkie2 @amconmag Dumber than a box of rocks

@amconmag Atleast we know what they will be teaching and they're not indoctrinating our children to hate America.

@CHRISF0GLE Im not worried for me personally but lmao this is fucked

@_motherslug Cannibal is goated but I got strange looks for buying it cuz of the swastika on the cover

Are we ready for the John Hawkes-aissance? I am prepared to lead this bitch, and we are gonna dive into the deep end with The Beetle Leg, a surrealist western that is truly unlike anything I have ever read.

@loomdoop I have a student who spent 30 minutes after school going on a tangent to me about how the lack of public transit is due to structural racism and I was rapt the whole time. There's hope for good transit nerds

Why are so many transit nerds Nazis? You might think that obsession with public transit would coincide with things like humanism, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance. But nope. They're like "put the untermenschen in the camps!"

@CHRISF0GLE Need to ai check yourself before you ai wreck yourself

@CHRISF0GLE The teacher groups im in on Facebook are constantly asking to check student work if its Ai and theyre always saying the checkers never help like why did u bother trying them at all?

You can do artistic and avant garde stuff but the story should be as clear as possible, even if you make it a puzzle. The reader needs to be able to construct the puzzle and see the vision

Current reading boning up on materials of all sorts for creative writing. Interesting is Mamet's hatred for the avant garde- what he calls performance art here - almost as a kind of self indulgent claptrap. I find myself in partial agreement.

Reading fiction is an expenditure of personal energy that is only tangentially connected to the projects of the self. That is one aspect of what makes reading so hard and especially it is what makes reading hard to concentrate on. It's always possible when reading fiction to say of any fictional character, to paraphrase Hamlet, what’s Hecuba to me, or me to Hecuba? And that I care at all what becomes of poor Ophelia when I have my own thwarted loves and mental health to consider on a daily basis is really a miracle of civilisation. Truly, why should anyone care about the books in the library when the entire house is burning down? However, those of us who still believe in literature as a positive force in the world, believe concomitantly that this self-giving to the world of the unreal is a necessary psychic exercise and that books are a technology for its facilitation. I must routinely distance myself, in order to read well and with concentration, from the events, positions, projects, hates and loves of my own particular self and delve for long periods that would seem wasted from any more egoic point of view into a universe that does not even exist in the conventional sense. To do so is to abnegate concentration and control over the world as (we think) it is. However, it is equally to open up new and unimagined spaces, towards which I don't know what.

Often times I am not falling asleep til 1 or 2 in the morning and getting up at 5

Of course I alternate between sleep aids like zquil and melatonin but I try to avoid using them because they have caused me to sleep through my alarms in the morning

The title story of Oblivion hits really close to home in an oblique way because I have this inability to shut my brain off when I'm trying to go to sleep, and I spend more time thinking of ways to get myself to sleep than actually sleeping, and so eventually